US Army

The Bridge at Remagen.

US Army.

The bastioned western end of the Ludendorff Railway Bridge, Remagen, following its capture by US Army units on 7 March, 1945. The Ludendorff Bridge was part of a programme conceived before WW1, designed to improve railway communications between Germany and the anticipated Germany v. France battleground of any forthcoming war as envisaged in the Schlieffen Plan. This sort of railway planning went back to the earliest days of rail on continental Europe, in which military considerations were often paramount in the development of rail routes. The Ludendorff Bridge did Germany little good, however, when US Army units (much to their surprise) succeeded in capturing it on 7 March, 1945, giving them an opprotunity to establish first a bridgehead, then a substantial encroachment on the east bank of the Rhine. The German failure to destroy the bridge on time seems to have been due to a combination of somewhat unsound decision-making by the German commander on the spot, combined with a simple shortage of adequate explosives to effect the bridge's comprehensive destruction. At any rate, the bridge stood for ten days after its capture, in spite of frantic attempts by the defenders to destroy it, ranging right up to an attack by V-2 missiles. On 17 March (St Patrick's Day, as it happens) the bridge suddenly collapsed into the Rhine, taking some 2 dozen US engineers with it; presumably, the combination of the original attempts at destroying it and the heavy shelling, bombing and missile attacks (at best, near misses) finally got the better of the structure. However, by then, the damage had been done as far as the Germans were concerned. The Americans had already established a substantial encroachment across the river, supported by pontoon bridges that were beyond the effective range of German artillery to hit them. Best regards, JR.